Alan C. L. Yu

Dr. Alan Yu is interested in questions related to language variation and change, particularly with regard to the so-called actuation problem: what causes the inception of language change, if the linguistic conditions favoring particular changes are always present? He approaches this question from the point of view of individual differences, focusing particularly on how differences in the socio- and neuro-cognitive make-ups lead to variability in perceptual and production norms across individuals and how such variability relates to socio-indexical factors. He has done extensive work on Cantonese and Washo, a Native American language spoken in California and Nevada. In his spare time, he also works on the morphology-phonology interface, his first love in linguistics.

Books:

• Yu, Alan C. L. 2007. A natural history of infixation. Oxford: The Oxford University Press.
• Yu, Alan C. L. 2013. Origins of sound change: Approaches to phonologization. 2013. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• John Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, and Alan C. L. Yu (eds). 2011. The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Selected Articles/Chapters:

• Yu, Alan C. L. 2022. Perceptual cue weighting is influenced by the listener’s gender and subjective evaluations of the speaker: the case of English stop voicing. Frontiers in Psychology. DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.840291.
• Ou, Jinghua and Alan C. L. Yu. 2021. Neural Correlates of Individual Differences in Speech Categorization: Evidence from Subcortical, Cortical, and Behavioral Measures. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 37(3): 269-284. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2021.1980594 
• Yu, Alan C. L., Crystal W. T. Lee, Chen Lan, and Peggy P. K. Mok. 2021. “A new system of Cantonese tone? Tone perception and production in Hong Kong South Asian Cantonese.” Language and Speech, 65 (3): 625-649.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309211046030
• Ou, Jinghua, Alan C. L. Yu, and Ming Xiang. 2021. “Individual differences in categorization gradience as predicted by online processing of phonetic cues during spoken word recognition: Evidence from eye movements.” Cognitive Science, 45(3): e12948. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12948.